The resilience of organizations is increasingly dependent on their ability to develop radical innovation capabilities. While the literature documents numerous cases of organizations that already have radical innovation capabilities, the question of organizational devices that can be used to stimulate the emergence of such capabilities remains poorly addressed. Specifically, training for innovation and creativity has been proposed as a means to foster innovation capabilities; however, there has been little empirical evidence concerning the long‐term impacts of such training. To fill this gap, this article aims to document and evaluate the efforts of the research institute of a major Canadian energy company to provide training for innovation and creativity to initiate a radical innovation capability. We rely on a longitudinal study over the span of 18 months, where we observed 128 h of training and conducted 70 semi‐structured interviews with a sample of 40 researchers. We found that training for creativity and innovation has the potential to develop individual creative skills for exploration, to catalyze and federate collective action through common methods and a shared sense of what innovation entails, and to help create a common language and vocabulary between the different groups or divisions of an organization to talk about exploration.

Organizations today need to adapt their operations for a more sustainable future, and the transition management literature has highlighted the need for individuals who can collaborate with others to find new paths forward. Essentially, these individuals are boundary spanners with specific skills and competences to bridge diverging perspectives and facilitate knowledge dissemination and integration. Such individuals become critical change agents in organizations and essential in preparing the organization for sustainability transitions. The purpose of this study is to explore how organizations can enable and encourage individuals to take on this role and develop the skills and competences needed to become boundary spanners. Based on a case study set in a large Canadian energy corporation striving to shift towards more sustainable operations, our paper explores the emergence of boundary spanners, focusing on the effects of a design training program in supporting such roles in the organization. Our findings outline essential characteristics of boundary spanners; through illustrative career trajectories of four individuals participating in the training program, we show how the training program contributed to the emergence of boundary spanners.

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L’objectif de cette contribution est d’analyser les rôles que peuvent jouer les communautés de pratique dans des démarches d’exploration nécessitant de l’innovation collective. L’analyse se fonde sur une étude longitudinale de 16 mois. Les résultats montrent que des communautés de pratique dédiées à des méthodes d’exploration peuvent jouer un rôle majeur dans l’ouverture des processus d’innovation d’une organisation. Dépassant les fonctions d’un intermédiaire d’innovation, ces collectifs autonomes accompagnent cette dynamique en sensibilisant et en légitimant l’importance d’explorer certains enjeux d’innovation avec des partenaires, en structurant et en animant des démarches d’innovation collective, tout en interprétant et documentant les apprentissages et les résultats liés à ces initiatives.

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